Should the US Congress appropriate funds for the repurchase of older vehicles?

David Bernstein

Applied Economics Letters, 2010, vol. 17, issue 15, 1475-1478

Abstract: Proponents of vehicle buyback programmes maintain that the earlier retirement of older vehicles will reduce pollution, increase income for lower income households and stimulate the automobile industry. This article provides a brief assessment of costs and benefits of vehicle buyback programmes. There are environmental benefits from the early retirement of automobiles and light trucks; however, some pollutants are not closely related to vehicle age. Moreover, vehicle buyback programmes are unlikely to reduce consumption of gasoline by a substantial amount and may even increase gasoline consumption in the short run because vehicle age is associated with an increase in miles travelled. Vehicle buyback programmes are not unambiguously progressive because they will increase the price of older vehicles, the only source of transportation for lower income groups. This analysis does not justify the creation of a national large-scale vehicle buyback programme. However, vehicle buyback programme targeting the highest emission vehicles and vehicles likely to fail emission inspections creates support for more stringent vehicle emission standards and systems, a proven method to reduce mobile source air pollution. It may be useful to expand subsidies for existing local vehicle buyback programmes and create incentives for the creation of these programmes by additional municipalities.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article& ... 40C6AD35DC6213A474B5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:apeclt:v:17:y:2010:i:15:p:1475-1478

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEL20

DOI: 10.1080/13504850903035931

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics Letters is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics Letters from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().